Regular readers know I have a hard time feigning interest in what Warren Buffett’s doing over at the world’s largest hedge fund.

What’s going on at Berkshire is more or less irrelevant unless Warren’s buying or selling something you own. In Q2, he sold something damn near everybody owns in one way or another, whether as a single-stock holding in a brokerage account, through an index product in a retirement fund or via the phone in your hand, the smart watch on your wrist or the laptop you just bought for your college student: Apple. For the second straight quarter, Buffett sold Apple. And this time he sold a whole lot of it, dialing up Berkshire’s cash pile to cartoonish heights in the process.

It’s with that in mind that I’m taking some time to document Berkshire’s quarterly “earnings,” a misnomer for any number of reasons.

As of December 31, 2023, the value of Warren’s Apple shares was — and try not laugh considering he spent just a little over $30 billion acquiring them — $174 billion. At the end of Q2, his stake was worth “just” $84 billion and enough loose change to buy Steve Mnuchin.

The scope of that divestiture raised some eyebrows. While editorializing around a decision to trim his Apple stake in May, Buffett said the company was “even better” than the other concentrated positions Berkshire has, which is really saying something: Those positions are Coke, Chevron, Bank of America and American Express, four pretty good businesses. At the time, Buffett suggested he sold Apple in Q1 to pay taxes, and indicated the company will remain Berkshire’s largest holding for the foreseeable future.

That’s the brief backstory for Berkshire’s outsized Q2 selling. To be sure, Apple’s still Buffett’s largest holding — by a country mile — but the sheer size and scope of the sale suggested (to some anyway) that this isn’t just about taxes anymore.

As the simple figure above shows, Q2 stands out. The stock did well, but the value of Berkshire’s stake plunged.

There was a fair amount of hand-wringing over the weekend about why Warren decided to sell that much Apple. Some speculated (ludicrously) that Buffett, a man born under the Herbert Hoover administration, has special insight into the outlook for Apple’s efforts to integrate advanced chat bots and other AI tools into the company’s consumer products.

Without casting aspersions at the elderly, I don’t think Warren has any such insight whatsoever, let alone an inside line on Tim Cook’s “Apple Intelligence” rollout. Rather, I think Buffett saw a massive stake in a consumer products company on the eve of what might be a shallow recession and decided to take some (more) chips off the table. After all, those chips can be parked in T-bills where they’ll earn an enormous amount of interest even if the Fed delivers on the most aggressive rate-cut expectations.

The figure below’s eye-popping. Buffett was a net seller of damn near $76 billion in stocks during Q2. It was the seventh straight quarter during which Berkshire was a seller on net.

Buffett’s cash pile grew commensurately. Berkshire now has more than a quarter trillion in cash, all of it earning somewhere in the neighborhood of 5%.

So, what does it mean? Is Buffett’s “selling spree” a bad omen for Apple or for the market more generally?

Who knows. I doubt it. If you’re looking for reasons to be bearish, there are plenty all of a sudden, on the off chance you slept through last week. You don’t have to read it into Buffett’s Apple selling.

But in the event the three-week equity selloff that so far has the S&P all of 5.5% off the highs (oh, the humanity!) morphs into something more sinister, investors will probably say we should’ve heeded the unspoken warning from “The Oracle.”

In a testament to the market’s penchant for reading too much into one man’s portfolio decisions, a Bloomberg headline published over the weekend read, “Apple Investors Urged to Stay Calm After Buffett Slashes Stake.”